The winners of the California Book Awards 2012 are honored at the Commonwealth Club of California. Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored the exceptional literary merit of California writers and publishers. Each year a select jury considers hundreds of books in search of the very best in literary achievement. Eligible books must be written while the author is a resident of California, and they must be published during the year under consideration. Awards are presented in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, First Work of Fiction, Poetry, Californiana, Notable Contribution to Publishing, Juvenile Literature and Young Adult Literature."

Jack Boulware

Jack Boulware is a San Francisco Library Laureate, co-founder of Litquake, and the author/co-author of three books, including the Bay Area punk oral history Gimme Something Better. He grew up on a ranch in Montana.

Chris Carlsson

Chris Carlsson, executive director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer. For the last twenty-five years his activities have focused on the underlying themes of horizontal communications, organic communities and public space. He was one of the founders, editors and frequent contributors to the ground-breaking San Francisco magazine Processed World. He also helped launch the monthly bike-ins known as Critical Mass that have spread to five continents and over 300 cities. He has edited four books, "Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology" (Verso: 1990), "Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture" (City Lights: 1998, co-edited with James Brook and Nancy J. Peters), "Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration" (AK Press: 2002), â€œThe Political Edgeâ€ (City Lights Foundation: 2004). He published his first novel, â€œAfter The Deluge,â€ in 2004, a story of post-economic San Francisco in the year 2157. His latest work, â€œNowtopiaâ€ was published in May 2008. Carlsson makes his living as a book designer, editor, and typesetter. He is a member of Media Workers Union Local 100 in San Francisco. He is a founder of CounterPULSE, a San Francisco-based arts organization, where he has been producing a series of public Talks since January 2006, and conducting award-winning bicycle history tours for over a decade.

Jason Felch

Jason Felch is a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where he specializes in investigative journalism. Before joining the Los Angeles Times, he reported on Latin America, petroleum and other issues for a number of outlets, including the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and FRONTLINE/World.

Ralph Frammolino

Ralph Frammolino reported for nearly 25 years at the Los Angeles Times. His work has also appeared in the New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review. Frammolino is now a media consultant for various aid projects in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, where he trains working journalists on investigative reporting techniques and right to information laws. In 2006, Ralph was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for exposing the role of the J. Paul Getty Museum and other American museums in the black market for looted antiquities.

Mary Ellen Hannibal

Mary Ellen Hannibal is a writer and editor with experience in editorial, corporate communications and the nonprofit world. A former book review editor, her writing has appeared in Esquire, the San Francisco Chronicle, Yoga Journal and many other publications. She is the author of three books, most recently Evidence of Evolution (Abrams 2009).

Alice LaPlante

Alice LaPlante is a writer and teacher of writing who has more than 20 years experience as an award-winning journalist, corporate editorial consultant, writing coach, and university-level writing instructor. She has written for Forbes ASAP, BusinessWeek, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, Discover, and a host of other national publications. Her corporate clients include some of the best-known brands in the technology industry, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, Deloitte, and HP.
Alice is also an award-winning fiction writer. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and teaches creative writing at both Stanford and San Francisco State University. The author of five books (and counting), Alice includes among her publications a writing textbook, Method and Madness: The Making of a Story, published by W.W. Norton in 2009; Playing For Profit: How Digital Entertainment is Making Big Business Out of Child's Play (Wiley, 2000); and Passion to Profits: Business for Non-Business Majors(The Planning Shop, 2008). Her novel, Turn of Mind (Grove Atlantic, July 2011) became a New York Times, NPR, and American Independent Booksellers Association bestseller within a month of release. Turn of Mind was also designated a New York TimesEditors' Choice, an NPR, O Magazine, Vogue, and Globe and Mail Summer Reading Pick, and is featured in Barnes and Noble 2011 Discover Great New Writers program. Alice has a B.A. in Rhetoric and an MBA from the University of Illinois in Urbana.

Jonathan Allen Lethem

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Malie Meloy

Maile Meloy grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles. Her new novel, The Apothecary, is her first for young readers, and won the 2012 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award. She is also the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. Meloy's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Reviewâ€™s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta's 21 Best Young American Novelists. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O.

Gabrielle E. Miller

Dr. Gabrielle Miller joined Raising A Reader as National Executive Director in December 2008. Prior to assuming her current role, Dr. Miller was vice president for programs at Reading is Fundamental, the nation's oldest and largest nonprofit literacy organization. In that role, she was responsible for all literacy and early education programs, including Reading is Fundamental's multicultural initiative, all special literacy initiatives and established new, innovative programming efforts.
Before joining RIF, Dr. Miller served as assistant vice president of educational programs at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD, where she held a number of positions before ultimately assuming a leadership role in the special education department. During her time at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, Dr. Miller was primarily responsible for educational program development and research. Her research efforts focused on evaluating interventions for at-risk learners of all ages. Concurrently, she served as an assistant professor in The Johns Hopkins University's Graduate School of Education's Department of Special Education.
Dr. Miller began her career as a general and special education teacher in the Queen Anne's County, Maryland public school system. She earned her bachelor's degree in elementary and special education from the University of Delaware and completed her graduate studies (both master's and doctoral) in special education and administration at Johns Hopkins University. She has two grown step-sons and in her spare time enjoys reading, golf, gardening, classic movies, and spending time with her husband, Jeffery.

Peter Orner

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and attended Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. He received a law degree from Northeastern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Orner's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, The Forward, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Ploughshares. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice won a Pushcart Prize. Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship (2007-2008). A film version of one of Orner's stories, "The Raft" with a screenplay by Orner and the film's director, Rob Jones, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

Joanne Rocklin

Joanne Rocklin, Ph.D. has written over 20 books for children, encompassing several genres. She has a doctorate in psychology and is a former elementary school teacher, presently writing children's books full-time. Originally from Montreal, Canada, Joanne lived in Los Angeles for many decades. She now resides in Oakland, California with her husband, Gerry, one cat, and one golden retriever. When not writing she enjoys babysitting regularly for her four grandchildren, singing in a choir, gardening, baking artisan breads, and reading voraciously.

giovanni singleton

giovanni singleton is a founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal committed to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her debut collection, "Ascension," is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane. She coordinates Lunch Poems, the monthly poetry reading series at UC Berkeley under the direction of Robert Hass.

Hector Tobar

As a native of East Hollywood, Hector Tobar grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. He devoured the sports pages, especially, but never thought he'd work at a paper his immigrant father occasionally delivered to make a little extra cash. He remembers being 11 and buying the Times' extra announcing President Nixon's resignation.
A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, Hector has worked at the Times on and off since the late 1980s, working his way up from The Times' suburban bureaus to its national and foreign desks. Most recently he was The Times Mexico City bureau chief. He's fluent in English and Spanish, and can get around in Portuguese. He also knows six words in Arabic and can order a cheese omelet in French.
Hector has a Master in Fine Arts from UC Irvine, has written two books and is the father of three children.

David Rains Wallace

David Rains Wallace is the author of over a dozen books, including The Bonehunter's Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age (1999), The Monkey's Bridge: Mysteries of Evolution in Central America (1997), and The Quetzal and the Macaw: The Story of Costa Rica's National Parks (1992).

Paul Wible

Paul Wible, Senior Executive Vice President and National Finance Group Head, joined the bank in 1992. He is a member of the bank's Executive Management Committee.
Wible is responsible for the bank's National Finance Group which encompasses five divisions. National Indirect Consumer Lending originates and services automobile loans and leases through a network of dealers within the Bank's 19-state footprint plus Georgia, Texas and Florida as well as recreational vehicle and marine loans nationally through a network of dealers and subsidiary Essex Credit Corporation. Direct Consumer Lending originates and services home equity loans and lines of credit and installment loans through the Bank's branch network. Mortgage Banking originates and services residential first mortgage loans through the branch network and a dedicated sales force. Credit and Debit Card Services is responsible for personal, small business and commercial credit and debit cards. Business Link originates commercial loans and lines of credit for small businesses through the branch network.
Prior to his current position, Wible was Executive Vice President responsible for the branches and business banking centers. Wible also held management positions in Consumer Finance and Consumer Credit Operations. Wible's prior experience includes finance and treasury related positions. He also spent five years with Ernst & Young in San Francisco.
Active in civic and professional affairs, Wible is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants; member of Pacific Bankers Management Institute Board of Directors, the senior governing body of the Pacific Coast Banking School; and a member of the Consumer Bankers Association Government Relations Committee and Auto Finance Committee.
Wible received his degree from St. Mary's College and holds a CPA license in California.